MDM for Anything (MDM Summer Series Part 6)

MDM for Anything (MDM Summer Series Part 6)

Jean-Michel Franco is Director of Product Marketing for Talend. He has dedicated his career to developing and broadening the adoption of innovative technologies in companies. Prior to joining Talend, he started out at EDS (now HP) by creating and developing a business intelligence (BI) practice, joined SAP EMEA as Director of Marketing Solutions in France and North Africa, and then lately Business & Decision as Innovation Director. He authored 4 books and regularly publishes articles, presents at events and tradeshows and can be followed on Twitter: @jmichel_franco

After reviewing all the other use cases, there is what I call MDM for “anything”. This is in fact not a real facet, because the only common point of the product data that goes in this category is that they don’t belong to the aforementioned categories.

MDM for Product Data deals with the things that you are producing, and eventually also the things that you using to produce them. The structure of those, together with the processes to create, distribute and use them, may be very specific to your activity: Professional Services companies, and more generally any companies that deals with large projects, have their work breakdown structures. Environmental Services have their waste types. Life Sciences companies have their compounds. And the list goes on. When those things are widely shared across activities and the enterprise is struggling with multiple data entry or reporting systems, resulting in process inefficiencies, then there is obviously a place for MDM for Product Data.

In case you have found in your business such "things" that would benefit from MDM, you may then feel a little lonely while searching for literature, well documented business cases to inspire you while defining your ROI, or predefined models and templates. But the good news is that you should find food for thought from the other use cases anyway: the core discipline of Master Data will still apply, so you will be able to leverage best practices in order to create your shared definition of data, manage data accurary, establish data governance and stewardship, and connect your data sources and targets, applications, business processes and users to your master data.

Now that we have discovered the 5 facets of MDM for Product Data, let us look at the capabilities needed from an MDM solutions to address each of those use cases, begining with MDM for Material Data.